US Cultural History Reading List:
Working Class Culture:
Gutman, Herbert. Work, Culture, and Society in Industrializing America. (1977)
Roediger, David. Wages of Whiteness (1991).
Rosenzweig, Roy. Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in an Industrial City,
1870-1920. (1983)
Genovese, Eugene. Roll Jordan Roll: The World the Slaves Made (1974).
Baldwin, Davarian. Chicago’s New Negroes: Modernity, the Great Migration, and Black Urban
Life (2007)
Freeman, Joshua. Working Class New York: Life and Labor since World War II. (2000)
Kelley, Robin D.G. Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (1996).
Peiss, Kathy. Cheap Amusements: Working Women and Leisure in turn-of-the-century New
York (1986)
Gorn, Elliott. The Manly Art: Bare-Knuckle Prize Fighting in America (1986)
Hunter, Tera. To ‘Joy My Freedom: Southern Black Women’s Lives and Labors after the Civil
War (1997)
American Empire:
Furstenberg, Francois. In the Name of the Father: Washington’s Legacy, Slavery, and the
Making of a Nation (2006)
Greenberg, Amy. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire (2005)
Henkin, David. The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth
Century America. (2007)
Richardson, Heather Cox. West From Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil
War (2007)
Bederman, Gail. Manliness and Civilization (1996)
Hoganson, Fighting for American Manhood (2000)
Wexler, Laura. Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of US Imperialism (2000)
Renda, Mary. Taking Haiti: Military Occupation and the Culture of U.S. Imperialism, 19151940 (2000)
Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions,
1876-1916 (1987)
Whiteness/Social Construction of Race:
Dain, Bruce. The Hideous Monster of the Mind: American Race Theory in the Early
Republic (2002).
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy
of Race (1998)
Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812 (1977).
Saxton, Alexander. The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Politics and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth Century (1990)
Roediger, David. Working Towards Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became
White: The Strange Journey From Ellis Island to the Suburbs (2006)
Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los
Angeles (2006)
Gibson, James. Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-Vietnam America (1994)
Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Whiteness of a Different Color: European Immigrants and the Alchemy
of Race (1998)
Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2006)
Matthew Lassiter, Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)
Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Politics and Mass Culture in
Nineteenth Century (1990)
Pascoe, Peggy. “Miscegenation Law, Court Cases, and Ideologies of ‘Race’ in TwentiethCentury America,” Journal of American History 83 (June 1996)
Capitalist Transformation/Responses to Industrialism
Haltunnen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in
America, 1830-1870 (1982).
Sklansky, Jeffrey. The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American
Thought, 1820-1920 (2002).
Johnson, Paul E. A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New
York, 1815-1837 (1978).
Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life, and the Crisis of
Gilded Age America (2002).
Lears, T.J. Jackson. No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American
Culture, 1880-1920 (1981)
----------. Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (1994)
----------. Something For Nothing: Luck in America (2003)
Livingston, James. Pragmatism and the Political Economy of Cultural Revolution, 18501940 (1994).
Putney, Christopher. Muscular Christianity: Manhood and Sports in Protestant America, 18801920. (2001)
Wiebe, Robert. The Search For Order: 1877-1920. (1968)
Orvell, Miles. The Real Thing: Imitation and Authenticity in American Culture, 18801940 (1989).
Hofstadter, Richard. The Age of Reform (1960)
Chambers, John Whiteclay. The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920
(1992)
Johnston, Robert. The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of
Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (2003)
Goodwyn, Lawrence. The Populist Moment: A Short History of the Agrarian Revolt in America
(1978)
American Indian Identity:
Deloria, Philip. Playing Indian (1999)
Deloria, Philip. Indians in Unexpected Places (2006)
Hansen, Jonathan. The Lost Promise of Patriotism: Debating American Identity, 18901920 (2003).
Ostler, Jeffrey. The Plains Sioux and U.S. Colonialism from Lewis and Clark to Wounded Knee
(2004)
Bsumek, Erika Marie. Indian-Made: Navajo Culture in the Marketplace, 1868-1940 (2008)
Gender and Sexuality:
Boag, Peter. Same-Sex Affairs: Constructing and Controlling Homosexuality in the Pacific
Northwest (2003)
Canady, Margot. “Building a Straight State: Sexuality and Social Citizenship under the 1944 G.I.
Bill,” Journal of American History 90 (December 2003)
Chauncey, George. Gay New York (1995)
Cott, Nancy. The Groundings of Modern Feminism (1987)
Enke, Anne. Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (2007)
Halttunen, Karen. Confidence Men and Painted Women. (1982)
Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. “African American Women’s History and the Metalanguage of
Race,” Signs (Winter 1992)
Lui, Mary Ting Yi. The Chinatown Trunk Mystery: Murder, Miscegenation, and Other
Dangerous Encounters in Turn-of-the-Century New York City (2005)
May, Elaine. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (1988)
Mitchell, Michele. Righteous Propagation: African Americans and the Politics of Racial Destiny
after Reconstruction (2004)
Mumford, Kevin. Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early
Twentieth Century (1997)
Pascoe, Peggy. What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America
(2009)
Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution
to the Modern Era (1993)
Russell, Thaddeus. “The Color of Discipline: Civil Rights and Black Sexuality,” American
Quarterly 60 (March 2008)
Suran, Justin David. “Coming Out against the War: Antimilitarism and the Politicization of
Homosexuality in the Era of Vietnam,” American Quarterly 53 (September 2001)
Ullman, Sharon. Sex Seen: The Emergence of Modern Sexuality in America (1997)
Rise of Modern Conservatism:
Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage: George Wallace, the Origins of the New Conservatism, and
the Transformation of American Politics. (2000)
Critchlow, Donald. Phyllis Schlafly and Grassroots Conservatism: A Woman’s Crusade (2005).
Kruse, Kevin. White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism (2005).
Lassiter, Matthew. The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (2006)
McGirr, Lisa. Suburban Warriors (2004)
Matusow, Allen J. The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the 1960s. (1984)
Wiley, Peter & Robert Gottlieb, Empires in the Sun: The Rise of the New American West. (1982)
Schulman, Bruce. From Cotton Belt to Sunbelt: Federal Policy, Economic Development,
and the Transformation of the South, 1938-1980 (1991)